Debian News – Page 50

My Debian Activities in March 2012

April 1, 2012 by Raphaël Hertzog

This is my monthly summary of my Debian related activities. If you’re among the people who made a donation to support my work (227.83 €, thanks everybody!), then you can learn how I spent your money. Otherwise it’s just an interesting status update on my various projects.

Dpkg

Thanks to Guillem, dpkg with multiarch support is now available in Debian sid. The road has been bumpy, and it has again been delayed multiple times even after Guillem announced it on debian-devel-announce. Finally, the upload happened on March 19th.

I did not appreciate his announce because it was not coordinated at all, and had I been involved from the start, we could have drafted it in a way that sounded less scary for people. In the end, I provided a script so that people can verify whether they were affected by one of the potential problems that Guillem pointed out. While real, most of them are rather unlikely for typical multiarch usage.

Bernhard R. Link submitted a patch to add a new –status command to dpkg-buildflags. This command would print all the information required to understand which flags are activated and why. It would typically be called during the build process by debian/rules to keep a trace of the build flags configuration. The goal is to help debugging and also to make it possible to extract that information automatically from build logs. I reviewed his patch and we made several iterations, it’s mostly ready to be merged but there’s one detail where Bernhard and I disagree and I solicited Guillem’s opinion to try to take a decision. Unfortunately neither Guillem nor anyone else chimed in.

On request of Alexander Wirt, I uploaded a new backport of dpkg where I dropped the DEB_HOST_MULTIARCH variable from dpkg-architecture to ensure multi-arch is never accidentally enabled in other backports.

One last thing that I did not mention publicly at all yet, is that I contacted Lennart Poettering to suggest an improvement to the /etc/os-release file that he’s trying to standardize across distributions. It occurred to me that this file could also replace our /etc/dpkg/origins/default file (and not only /etc/debian_version) provided that it could store ancestry information. After some discussions, he documented new official fields for that file (ID_LIKE, HOME_URL, SUPPORT_URL, BUG_REPORT_URL). Next step for me is to improve dpkg-vendor to support this file (as a fallback or as default, I don’t know yet).

Packaging

I packaged quilt 0.60 (we’re now down to 9 Debian-specific patches, from a whopping 26 in version 0.48!) and zim 0.55.

In prevision of the next upstream version of Publican, I asked the Perl team to package a few Perl modules that Publican now requires. Less than two weeks after, all of them were in Debian Unstable. Congrats and many thanks to the Perl team (and Salvatore Bonaccorso in particular, which I happen to know because we were on the same plane during last Debconf!).

On a side note, being the maintainer of nautilus-dropbox became progressively less fun over the last months, in particular because the upstream authors tried to override some of the (IMO correct) packaging decisions that I made and got in touch with Ubuntu community managers to try to have their way. Last but not least, I keep getting duplicates of a bug that is not in my package but in the official package and that Dropbox did not respond to my query.

Book update

The translation is finished and we’re now reviewing the whole book. It takes a bit more time than expected because we’re trying to harmonize the style and because it’s difficult to coordinate the work of several volunteer reviewers.

The book cover is now almost finalized (click on it to view it in higher definitions):

We also made some progress on the interior design for the paperback. Unfortunately, I have nothing to show you yet. But it will be very nice… and made with just a LaTeX stylesheet tailored for use with dblatex.

The liberation fundraising slowed down with only 41 new supporters this month but it made a nice bump anyway thanks to a generous donation of 1000 EUR by Offensive security, the company behind Backtrack Linux. They will soon communicate on this, hopefully it will boost the operation. It would be really nice if we managed to raise the remaining 3000 EUR in the few weeks left until the official release of the book!

The work on my book dominated the month and explains my relative inactivity on other fronts. I worked much more than usual, and my wife keeps telling me that I look tired and that I should go in bed earlier… but I see the end of the tunnel: if everything goes well, the book should be released in a few weeks and I will be able to switch back to a saner lifestyle.

Thanks

See you next month for a new summary of my activities.

People behind Debian: Jörg Jaspert, FTPmaster, Debian Account Manager, and more

March 23, 2012 by Raphaël Hertzog

Jörg is a very active contributor within Debian, and has been for a long time. This explains why he holds so many roles (FTPmaster and Debian Account Manager being the 2 most important ones)… Better known as Ganneff (his IRC nick), he’s not exactly the typical hacker. He has no beard and used to drink milk instead of beers. 🙂

Check out his interview to learn more about some of the numerous ways one can get involved in Debian, managing its infrastructure… and without having to be a packager.

Raphael: Who are you?

Jörg: My name is Jörg Jaspert and I’m 35 years old working for a small company doing system administration and consulting work for our customers. I’m married for a little while now and sometime soon a little Ganneff will be crawling out of my wife. (Whoever didn’t think of the movie “Alien” now is just boring).

Raphael: How did you start contributing to Debian?

Jörg: I started using Debian somewhere around 2000, 2001. Before that I had the misfortune to try SuSE and RedHat, both with a user experience that let me fully understand why people think Linux is unusable. (Due to my work I’m in the unfortunate situation to have to use RedHat on two machines. Funny how they are still utter crap and worse than bad toys). And all of this “lets get a Linux running here” came up because I was trying to find a replacement for my beloved OS/2 installation, which I had for some years.

So after I got Debian installed, good old Potato, I got myself active on our mailing lists, starting with the German user one.

A bit later I replied to a question if someone can help as staff for a Debian booth somewhere. It was the most boring event I ever visited (very nice orga, unfortunately no visitors), but I got a few important things there:

a signature from a DD on my key (Hi grisu),
a discussion with an upstream author with some useful piece of software to package and
an impression that this can be fun, if there are just some visitors for an event. So I tried again and did help as staff on a LinuxTag booth a while later.

The software I packaged, found me a sponsor and voila, maintainer I was. Some more packages got added and at some point my sponsor turned out to be my advocate. The NM process run around 2 months, and mid April 2002 I got THE MAIL.

Raphael: Some Debian developers believe that you have too many responsibilities within Debian (DAM, FTPMaster, Debconf, Partners, Planet Debian, Mirrors, …). Do you agree that it can be problematic, and if yes, are you trying to scale down?

Jörg: It’s DebConf, tssk.

And yes, I do have some extra groups and roles. And you even only list some, leaving out all I do outside Debian. But simply counting number of roles is a plain stupid way to go. Way more interesting is how much work is behind a role and how many other people are involved.

And looking at those you listed I don’t see any I am a SPOF. Let’s look at those you listed:

DAM: Here I did start out assisting James to get the huge backload down which had accumulated over time.

Nowadays I am merely the one with the longest term as DAM. Christoph Berg joined in April 2008 and Enrico Zini followed during October 2010, both very active. Especially Enrico, lately with the redesign of the NM webpages.

FTPMaster: The basic outline of the FTPMaster history is similar to the DAM one. I joined as an assistant, after the oh-so-famous Vancouver meeting in 2004. Together with Jeroen, we both then got the backload down which had accumulated there. He did most of the removals while I had a fun time cleaning up NEW. And we both prepared patches for the codebase.

And in 2007, as the last action as DPL, Sam made me FTPMaster. Since then I haven’t been alone either. In fact we have much more rotation in the team than ever before, which is a good thing. Today we are 3 FTPMasters, 4 FTP Assistants and 1 Trainee.

Though we always like new blood and would welcome more volunteers.

DebConf: I am very far outside the central DebConf team. I am not even a delegate here. Currently I am merely an admin, though there are 4 others with the same rights on the DebConf machines. I’ve not taken any extra jobs this year, nor will I. Probably for next year again, but not 2012.

Planet: I am one of three again, but then Planet is mostly running itself. Debian developers can just edit the config, cron is doing the work, not much needed here. Occasional cleanups, every now and then a mail to answer, done. In short: No real workload attached.

Mirrors: My main part here is the ftpsync scriptset. Which is a small part of the actual work. The majority of it, like checking mirrors, getting them to fix errors, etc. is done by Simon Paillard (and since some time, Raphael Geissert is active there too, you might have heard about his http.debian.net).

Having said that, there is stuff I could have handled better or probably faster. There always is. Right now I have 2 outstanding things I want to do a (last) cleanup on and then give away.

Raphael: You got married last year. I know by experience that entertaining a relationship and/or a family takes time. How do you manage to combine this with your Debian involvement?

Jörg: Oh well, I first met my wife at the “International Conference on OpenSource” 2009 in Taiwan. So OpenSource, Debian and me being some tiny wheel in the system wasn’t entirely news to her. And in the time since then she learned that there is much more behind when you are in a community like Debian, instead of “just” doing it for work. Even better that she met Debian people multiple times already, and knows with who I am quarreling…

Also, she is currently attending a language school – having lots of homework in the evening. Gives me time for Debian stuff. 🙂

How that turns out with the baby I have no idea yet. I do want to train it to like pressing the M key, so little-Ganneff can deal with NEW all on its own (M being Manual reject), but it might take a day or twenty before it gets so far. 🙂

Raphael: Thanks to the continuous work of many new volunteers, the NEW queue is no longer a bottleneck. What are the next challenges for the FTPmaster team?

Jörg: Bad link, try this one. 🙂

Also, “no longer” sounds like its recent. It’s not, it’s just that people usually recognize the negative only and not the positive parts.

Well, there are a few challenges actually. The first one, even if it sounds simple, is an ongoing one: We need Debian Developers willing to do the work that is hidden behind those simple graphs.

Yes, we are currently having a great FTP Team doing a splendid work in keeping that queue reasonably small — this is a/THE sisyphean task per excellence. There will always be something waiting for NEW, even if you just cleaned the queue, you turn around and there is something else back in already. Spreading this workload to more people helps not burning one out.

So if one or more of the readers is interested, we always like new volunteers. You simply need to be an uploading DD and have a bit of free time. For the rest we do have training procedures in place.

Another one is getting the “multi-archive” stuff done. The goal is to end up with ONE host for all our archives. One dak installation. But separate overrides, trees, mirrors, policies and people (think RMs, backports team, security team). While this is halfway easy to think of in terms of “merging backports into main” it gets an interesting side note when you think of “merging security into main”. The security archive does have information that is limited to few people before public release of a security announce, and so we must make sure our database isn’t leaking information. Or our filesystem layer handling. Or logs. Etc. Especially as the database is synced in (near) realtime to a DD accessible machine. And the filesystem data too, just a little less often.

There is also a discussion about a good way to setup a “PPA for Debian” service. We do have a very far developed proposal here how it should work, and I really should do the finishing touches and get it to the public. Might even get a GSoC project on it.

So far for some short to middle term goals. If you want to go really long term, I do think that we should get to the point where we get rid of the classical view of a source package being one (or more) tarballs plus the Debian changes. Where a new version requires the full upload of one or more of those parts of the source package.

I don’t know exactly where it should end up. Sure, stuff like “one central DVCS, maintainers push there, the archive generates the source tarballs and prepares the mirrors” do sound good for a quick glance. But there are lots of trouble and pitfalls and probably some dragons hidden here.

Raphael: The Debian repositories are managed by DAK (Debian Archive Kit) which is not packaged. Thus Debian users pick tools like reprepro to manage their package repositories. Is that how things should be?

Jörg: Oh, Mark Hymers wants to do a package again. More power to him if he does, though yes, DAK is not exactly a quick-and-easy thing to install. But nowadays it is a trillion times easier than the past — thanks to Mark’s work people can now follow the instructions, scripts and whatever they find inside the setup directory.

Still, it really depends on the archive size you are managing. A complex tool like dak does not make sense for someone who wants to publish one or a dozen of his own packages somewhere. Thats just like doing a finger amputation with a chainsaw — it certainly works and is fun for the one with the chainsaw — but you probably end up a little overdoing it.

I myself am using dpkg-scan[packages|sources] from a shell script but also mini-dinstall in places (never got friend with reprepro when I looked at it). Works, and for the few dozen packages those places manage it is more than enough.

Also, using dak forces you into some ways of behaviour that are just what Debian wants — but might not be what a user wants. Like inability to overwrite an existing file. One of the reasons why mentors.debian.net won’t work with dak. Or the use of a postgres database. Or that of gpg.

Sure, if you end up having more than just a dozen packages, if you have many suites and also movement between them, then dak is sure a thing to look at.

And “how should things be”: however the user and admins of that certain install of reprepro, mini-dinstall, dak, whatever want it. This is not one-tool-for-all land 🙂

Raphael: What is the role of Debian Account Managers (DAM)? Do you believe that DAMs have a responsibility to “shape” Debian by defining limits in terms of who can join and what can be done within Debian?

Jörg: Quote from https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2010/10/msg00010.html:

The Debian Account Managers (DAM) are responsible for maintaining the list of members of the Debian Project, also known as Debian Developers. DAMs are authoritative in deciding who is a member of the Debian Project and can take subsequent actions such as approving and expelling Project members.

Now, aside from this quote, my OWN PERSONAL OPINION, without wearing anything even vaguely resembling a DAM hat: DAM is the one post that is entitled to decide who is a member or not. Usually that is in the way of joining (or not), which is simple enough. But every now and then this also means acting on a request to do something about whatever behaviour of a Debian Project member. I hate that (and i think one can easily replace I with WE there). But it’s our job.

We usually aren’t quick about it. And we don’t act on our own initiative when we do, we always have (numerous) other DDs complain/appeal/talk/whatever to us first. The “expulsion procedure”, luckily not invoked that often, does guarantee a slow process and lots of input from others.

Are we the best for it? Probably not, we are just some people out of a thousand who happen to have a very similar hobby — Debian. We aren’t trained in dealing with the situations that can come up.

But we are THE role inside Debian that is empowered to make such decisions, so naturally it ends up with us.

Raphael: You did a lot of things for Debian over the years. What did bring you the most joy? Are there things that you’re still bitter about?

Jörg: The most joy? Hrm, without being involved in Debian and SPI I would never have met my wife.
Or my current job.
Or a GR against me. Not many running around with that badge, though I’m still missing my own personal “Serious problems with Mr. Jaspert” thread. Bad you all.
Or visited so many places. Think of all the DebConfs, QA meetings, BSPs and whatever events.
Or met so many people.
Or learned so many things I would never even have come near without being DD.

Raphael: Is there someone in Debian that you admire for their contributions?

Jörg: Yes.

Thank you to Jörg for the time spent answering my questions. I hope you enjoyed reading his answers as I did. Note that older interviews are indexed on wiki.debian.org/PeopleBehindDebian.

Subscribe to my newsletter to get my monthly summary of the Debian/Ubuntu news and to not miss further interviews. You can also follow along on Identi.ca, Google+, Twitter and Facebook

People Behind Debian: Gregor Herrmann, member of the Perl team

March 8, 2012 by Raphaël Hertzog

I followed Gregor’s evolution within Debian because I used to be somewhat active in the Perl team. His case is exemplar because it shows that you don’t need to be an IT professional to join Debian and to make a difference. His QA page is impressive with hundreds of packages maintained and hundreds of non-maintainer uploads too.

While he started out slowly, I remember meeting him at Debconf 7 in Edinburgh and after that he really got more implicated. Again a case of someone joining for technical reasons but getting more involved and staying there for social reasons! 🙂 Let’s jump into the interview and learn more about him.

Raphael: Who are you?

Gregor: I’m 41 years old, and I live in Innsbruck, Austria, in a shared apartment with a friend of mine. In my day job, I’m working at the regional addiction prevention agency, so I’m one of the few Debian guys who’s not an IT student or professional. I started maintaining packages in 2006, and I am a DD since April 2008.

Raphael: How did you start contributing to Debian?

Gregor: After having used Debian on servers for some years, I finally switched to it on the desktop after some procrastinating. Soon afterwards I wanted to know more about the “making-of”, started to join mailing lists, filed bugs, and tried to learn packaging.

Luckily I quickly found a permanent sponsor — Tony Mancill, and we’re still co-maintaining each others’ packages. And when I packaged my first Perl modules, Gunnar Wolf invited me to join the Debian Perl Group, an offer I accepted a few days later. — And I’m still there 🙂

Later, the NM process, although it involved some waiting times, was also a good learning experience due to my AM Wouter Verhelst. (And in the meantime the organization of the NM process has vastly improved, from what I hear.)

So my starting point for joining Debian was my curiosity but what really helped me to find my way into the project was the support of the people who invited and helped me.

Raphael: What’s your biggest achievement within Debian or Ubuntu?

Gregor: I’m not sure I can name a single big achievement but I guess I can say that my contributions to the Debian Perl Group have helped to make and keep the team a success story.

Raphael: The pkg-perl team seems to work very well. As an active member, can you explain us how it is organized? How do you explain its success? In particular it seems to be a great entry point for new contributors.

Gregor: The team is huge, both in numbers of members and packages (over 2200). Since last DebConf we manage our source packages in git, we have 2 mailing lists and an IRC channel, and we manage to keep an overview by using PET, the Package Entropy Tracker.

It’s true that we get new members on a regular basis; we try to invite people (like it happened to me 6 years ago :)) but there are also quite a few new contributors who find our docs and introduce themselves on the mailing list. Maybe someone should conduct a study and ask them what motivated them to join. 🙂

We hand out group membership/commit access quickly, and we try to mentor new contributors actively during their early times in the group. Some of them leave for other projects after some time, but many also stay and become DDs later.

I’m not sure what the reasons for the group’s success are, maybe a combination of:

a culture in the group (and also in the upstream Perl community) that’s based on fun, cooperation, and respect;
the fact that packaging Perl modules is most of the time quite easy;
a great set of tools, and also (hopefully) useful documentation;
a bunch of relaxed people who are open to newcomers and try to help each other.

For everyone interested in joining the Debian Perl Group, our Welcome page on the wiki is a good starting point.

Raphael: What are your plans for Debian Wheezy?

Gregor: Nothing overly exciting. What I should do is getting a newer JabRef into Debian (which involves packaging some new Java libraries — any takers?).

A solution for libdatetime-timezone-perl (which ships timezone data converted to Perl modules and tends to get outdated when the timezone data change) would be nice; let’s see if #660404 leads to some results …

And some Perl packages will also need a bit of work for the hardening build flags release goal (cf. #657853).

Raphael: What’s the biggest problem of Debian?

Gregor: Inertia. While I really like the fact that Debian is a volunteer project, and that every contributor works when and on what they decide to work on, I get the feeling that Debian could do better in moving forward, innovating, taking decisions.

I also think that more uniformity in managing source packages would make things easier; it’s quite amazing to see how many source formats, packaging helpers, patch systems, RCSs etc. are used all over the archive. I’m not advocating for mono-cultures, and I consider this diversity a strength in general, but having to find out first how this particular package works when preparing a bug fix can be annoying.

On the bright side, I think that the myth “Debian and its mailing lists are mostly about flames” can be seen as dispelled in the meantime. Sure, sometimes the tone could be a bit more civil, but in general most of the interactions I’ve seen in the last years were friendly and helpful. IMO, the Debian Project consists of mostly nice and cooperative people, and that’s what makes it fun for me.

Raphael: You’re one of the most dedicated participants to RCBW (Release Critical Bugs of the Week), an initiative to fix RC bugs every week. How much time do you spend on it? What would you advise to people who are considering to join the movement?

Gregor: I got into the habit of fixing RC bugs after having been invited to my first Bug Squashing Party in Munich some years ago. During this weekend I saw that fixing RC bugs can be fun, is often not that difficult, and gives a warm fuzzy feeling 🙂 I can definitely recommend attending a BSP if one happens to be organized near you.

After tasting blood at this first BSP I tried to continue looking at RC bugs, and I guess I spend something around half an hour per day on it. I usually blog about it once a week, in order to motivate others to join in.

And joining is easy: just take a look at the tips people like Zack, Vorlon, or me have written. You don’t have to be a DD to help, many of my NMUs are based on patches that others kindly prepare and send to the BTS — kudos!

Another nice aspect is that the RC bug list contains problems from different fields: general packaging problems, language-specific issues, policy violations, etc. So there’s something for everybody, and you don’t have to be an expert in all fields to fix a specific bug.

What’s rewarding about fixing RC bugs is not only the feeling of accomplishment and the knowledge about having helped the next release — I also received quite a few “Thank you” mails from maintainers who were busy at that time and appreciated the help.

Raphael: Do you have wishes for Debian Wheezy?

Gregor: Well, there’s not so much left of the Wheezy release cycle if we manage to freeze in June 🙂 Some quick thoughts for Wheezy and Wheezy+1:

Obviously, getting multi-arch and the hardening build flags as far as possible would be good.
What I like is the idea of the time-based freeze, and I hope it will work out in June. And then I hope that the freeze will be shorter this time than during the last 2 releases.
Unless I’m missing something, the CUT discussions have more or less died down; IMO that’s a pity because there are users who run testing and would like to avoid the several month long freeze. Maybe someone can come up with new ideas for Wheezy+1 …
Too late for broad adoption in Wheezy but still: What constantly annoys me is the handling of conffiles during upgrades (when I want to keep changed values but at the same time want to add new variables). Config::Model seems to be the best idea so far for configuration upgrades but it’s not yet widely adopted.

Raphael: Is there someone in Debian that you admire for their contributions?

Gregor: There are many people in Debian I admire, too many to name them all. The first one that comes to my mind is Russ Allbery who not only does great work from lintian to Debian policy but who also sets a great example of communicating in a perfectly polite and respectful way even in heated discussions.

Thank you to Gregor for the time spent answering my questions. I hope you enjoyed reading his answers as I did. Note that older interviews are indexed on wiki.debian.org/PeopleBehindDebian.

Subscribe to my newsletter to get my monthly summary of the Debian/Ubuntu news and to not miss further interviews. You can also follow along on Identi.ca, Google+, Twitter and Facebook

My Debian Activities in February 2012

March 1, 2012 by Raphaël Hertzog

This is my monthly summary of my Debian related activities. If you’re among the people who made a donation to support my work (384.14 €, thanks everybody!), then you can learn how I spent your money. Otherwise it’s just an interesting status update on my various projects.

Dpkg and multiarch

The month started with a decision of the technical committee which allowed me to proceed with an upload of a multiarch dpkg even if Guillem had not yet finished his review (and related changes). Given this decision, Guillem made the experimental upload himself.

I announced the availability of this test version and invited people to test it. This lead to new discussions on debian-devel.

We learned in those discussions that Guillem changed his mind about the possibility of sharing (identical) files between multiple Multi-Arch: same packages, and that he dropped that feature. But if this point of the multiarch design had been reverted, it would mean that we had to update again all library packages which had already been updated for multi-arch. The discussions mostly stalled at this point with a final note of Guillem explaining that there was a tension between convenience and doing the right things every time that we discuss far-reaching changes.

After a few weeks (and a helpful summary from Russ Allbery), Guillem said that he remained unconvinced but that he put back the feature. He also announced that he’s close to having completed the work and that he would push the remaining parts of the multiarch branch to master this week (with the 1.16.2 upload planned next week).

That’s it for the summary. Obviously I participated in the discussions but I didn’t do much besides this… I have a “mandate” to upload a multiarch dpkg to sid but I did not want to make use of it while those discussions remained pretty unconclusive. Also Guillem made it pretty clear that the multiarch implementation was “buggy”, “not right” and “not finished” and that he had reworked code fixing at least some of the issues… since he never shared that work in progress, I also had no way to help even just by reviewing what he’s doing.

We also got a few multiarch bug reports, but I couldn’t care to get them fixed since Guillem clearly held a lock on the codebase having done many private changes… it’s not quite like this that I expect to collaborate on a free software project but life is full of surprises!

I’ll be relieved once this story is over. In the mean time, I have added one new thing on my TODO list since I made a proposal to handle bin-nmu changelogs and it’s something that could also fix #440094.

Misc dpkg stuff

After a discussion with Guillem, we agreed that copyright notices should only appear in the sources and not in manual pages or --version output, both of which are translated and cause useless work to translators when updated. Guillem already had some code to do it for --version strings, and I took care of the changes for the manual pages.

I merged some minor documentation updates, fixed a bug with a missing manpage. Later I discovered that some recent changes lead to the loss of all the translated manual pages. I suggested an improvement to dh_installman to fix this (and even prepared a patch). In the end, Guillem opted for another way of installing translated manual pages.

Triggered by a discussion on debian-devel, I added a new entry to my TODO list: implementing dpkg-maintscript-helper rm_conffile_if_owner to deal with the case where a conffile is taken over by another package which might (or might not) be installed.

Misc packaging

At the start of the month, I packaged quilt 0.51. The number of Debian specific patches is slowly getting down. With version 0.51, we dropped 5 patches and introduced a new one. Later in the month I submitted 4 supplementary patches upstream which have been accepted for version 0.60.

This new version (just released, I will package it soon) is an important milestone since it’s the first version without any C code (Debian had this for a long time but we were carrying an intrusive patch for this). Upstream developer Jean Delvare worked on this and based his work on our patch, but he went further to make it much more efficient.

Besides quilt, I also uploaded dh-linktree 0.2 (minor doc update), sql-ledger 2.8.36 (new upstream version), logidee-tools 1.2.12 (minor fixes) and publican 2.8-2 (to fix release critical bug #660795).

Debian Consultants

The Debian Project Leader is working on federating Debian Companies. As the owner of Freexian SARL, I was highly interested in it since Freexian “contributes to Debian, offers support for Debian and has a strategic interest in Debian”. There’s only one problem, you need to have at least 2 Debian developers on staff but I have no employees (it’s me only). I tried to argue that I have already worked with multiple Debian developers (as contractors) when projects were too big for me alone (or when I did not have enough time). Alas this argument was not accepted.

Instead, and since our fearless leader is never afraid to propose compromises, he suggested me (and MJ Ray who argued something similar than me) to try to bring life to the Debian Consultants list which (in his mind) would be more appropriate for one-man companies like mine. I accepted to help “animate” the list, and on his side, he’s going to promote both the “Debian Companies” and the “Debian Consultants” lists.

In any case, the list has seen some traffic lately and you’re encouraged to join if you’re a freelancer offering services around Debian. The most promising thing is that James Bromberger offered to implement a real database of consultants instead of the current static page.

Book update

We made quite some progress this month. There’s only one chapter left to translate. I thus decided to start with proofreading. I made a call for volunteers and I submitted one (different) chapter to 5 proofreaders.

The liberation campaign made a nice leap forwards thanks to good coverage on barrapunto.com. We have reached 80% while we were only at 72% at the start of the month (thanks to the 113 new supporters!). There’s thus less than 5000 EUR to raise before the book gets published under a free license.

Looking at the progression in the past months, this is unlikely to be completed on time for the release of the book in April. It would be nice though… so please share the news around you.

Speaking of the book’s release, I’m slowly preparing it. Translating docbook files is not enough, I must be able to generate HTML, ePub and PDF versions of the book. I’m using Publican for most formats, but for the PDF version Publican is moving away of fop and the replacement (webkit-based) is far from being satisfactory to generate a book ready for print. So I plan to use dblatex and get Publican to support dblatex as a backend.

I have hired Benoît Guillon, the upstream author of dblatex, to fix some annoying bugs and to improve it to suit my needs for the book (some results are already in the upstream CVS repository). I’m also working with a professional book designer to get a nice design.

I have also started to look for a Python Django developer to build the website that I will use to commercialize the book. The website will have a larger goal than just this though (“helping to fund free software developers”) but in free software it’s always good to start with your own case. 🙂

Hopefully everything will be ready in April. I’m working hard to meet that deadline (you might have noticed that my blog has been relatively quiet in the last month…).

Thanks

See you next month for a new summary of my activities.

Dpkg

Packaging

Book update

Thanks

Dpkg and multiarch

Misc dpkg stuff

Misc packaging

Debian Consultants

Book update

Thanks

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